Flow battery installed in Washington

Snohomish County Public Utility District (SNOPUD) has installed a 2MW/8MWh vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB), supplied by UniEnergy Technologies, which will be based on an open standards platform

The VRFB project, expected to be operational in the first half of 2017, is one of several energy storage projects SNOPUD has commissioned as part of a multi-year programme aimed at transforming how utilities manage grid operations, using flexible resources such as energy storage.

Two other grid batteries, installed at a substation near the utility’s operations centre, were commissioned in 2015.

These use lithium ion batteries, by two different suppliers, LG Chem and Mitsubishi-GS Yuasa, and are both 1MW/0.5MWh in size.

The battery storage contracts, including the VRFB project, which are worth more than $15 million, including $7 million in grants from the state’s Clean Energy Fund, have all been developed by Doosan Gridtech, an energy storage controls software developer set up in 2011 by David Kaplan, who previously worked at SNOPUD as a grid technologist.

The company, previously called 1Energy Systems, was acquired by Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction, as part of the Korean conglomerate’s expansion into the energy storage industry in mid-2016.

Without open standards, the growth of the energy storage industry could potentially be hampered, as each project would have to be custom engineered, with each vendor in the market providing their own proprietary design.